Waves, Fire and Salmon (FFFXXIII).

The waves have finally got serious here in Nazaré, but I've little time for taking photographs. The work on the Anna M goes on steadily, though Alec is rather distracted just now on account of his farm up the country being burnt out. All his olive and fruit trees and vines destroyed, along with his machinery there. At least his house survived.

The scale of the fire disaster in Portugal is horrendous. There is much anger at the Government and the Interior Minister resigned. It is claimed that some of the fires were started deliberately. However the facts remain that the country was tinder dry after weeks of drought and a very hot summer, while the evidence piles up that such events are what we must expect from global warming. The hot southerly breeze generated by Hurricane Ophelia as it headed for Ireland was incredible for October even here on the Portuguese coast.

Alec knew a man who could not outrun the fire on a road in a tractor at over 40 km/hr; he was very lucky to find a safe place to turn into. The death toll from the latest fires stands at 46. Many of his neighbours have lost everything, including their houses. At this stage the main priority is burying dead animals. Many of the animals that survived will have to be destroyed because there is nothing left in the country to feed them. Hay of course is one of the first things to burn.

One wonders how the countryside can recover, when surely one element in the tragedy is already the decline in the rural population. A traditional fire break was to cultivate and irrigate vegetables around houses. What happens when there is nobody left to do this work?

Enough of this, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane, though there too we encounter rural decline....

FFF XXIII, The Fish of Knowledge.

In Donegal in the 1970s, myself and Fiona were privileged to witness the last days of an ancient way of life. Paddy’s Day (the Feast of St Patrick on the 17th March) marked the beginning of the serious Spring work. The days were getting longer, and with luck drier, though the weather could still have a vicious sting to it, which goes to show how right T.S.Eliot was in his assertion that ‘April is the cruellest month’. Reserves are low and, if Spring lets one down in the line of weather, it is difficult indeed to get on with the work of cutting turf and sowing spuds. But if that fine dry spell came, it was great to be up in the fragrant air of the bogs, slicing out heaps of the dark squishy sods, laying them out to dry and gazing out over the ocean as we took our tea-break, before those darn midges come to make life there Hell!

By the middle of May, salmon fever would be gripping the coasts of Ireland. Soon it would be time to spend the short summer nights down there on the waves, with the hills now rearing up above us, to be unforgettably etched against the early morning light…. There would be a looking out of nets, repairing them and mounting new ones. This was the chance to break out of the straightjacket of subsistence living, maybe to buy a better boat, a decent car or even to build a house. The main craze at that time was the drift-net fishery, which was what my double-ended half-decker, An Cnoc Mor, had actually been built for; this fishery was in its heyday at the time, but first I must describe a very ancient and beautiful way of fishing the salmon that was still practised in Teelin Bay: dulling with a draft or ring net.

In a punt a crew waited quietly with their oars at the ready and net ready to shoot, with another man tending one end of the net ashore at one of several special spots around the bay. Sometimes they had to wait for long hours, but alert all the while for the least sign of a school of fish. Once it came, they were off in a flash, trying to encircle the fish with the net, with the man ashore throwing stones to try to scare the fish into it. The dull complete, both ends of the net would be gathered into the boat, with a great splashing of oars to deter the fish from escaping beneath it. Maybe one or two or maybe a hundred of the gorgeous great fish were taken, as the bag of the net was hauled aboard. Once a boat had shot their net, there would be a general change of station, each boat moving on to take the place of the next one. Of course it was hard to get a licence for it and it was a bit of a closed shop. It was also in danger of being made obsolete by the scarcity of fish, for which drift-netting was particularly blamed, since the fish had to evade one barrier of net after another all the way round the coast.

The conditions of this drift-net fishery were on the mad and dangerous side. The only legal nets for it were made of yarn rather than monofilament gut, and only 30 meshes deep. This meant they only worked in the dark, or the fish would see them, and indeed the darker the night and the rougher the sea, the better! John Maguire was a good fisherman, but he had a neighbour, Jerry McNern, who I suppose we have to say was an even better one. Certainly he was the right man for that game, and pursued it with great passion! He hailed from Dunkineely, the other side of Killybegs, and was of a different temperament altogether to the gentle men of Glencolmcille; he was very wired and sharp. He was a successful mid-water trawling skipper, but did not like the tedious summer trawling for whitefish. Indeed there were trawlers of 65ft at the salmon with 20 miles of net when the thing was at its height, but besides being totally illegal, this was not going to work for long, as we shall see! Anyway John prevailed on Jerry to join us.

Now Jerry was not one to cut much slack for this hippy bloke with ‘the BBC accent’! I have to say he sharpened me up no end; not a second’s lack of concentration went without rebuke; and it was just as well. As far as Jerry was concerned, there were basically three places to be: back of Rathlin (O’Byrne) Island, Malin Mor or Glen Head, and if necessary there was another stand in the mouth of the Glenbay. One had to be on the ball to get a good one, and that meant a clatter down from Teelin which was soon testing the workmanship of the man that built the Cnoc Mor. It requires great skill to put exactly the right shape on a clinker-built boat; it is all in the cut and twist of the planks, which must not be forced into shape. Anyway my boards were just a bit too flat under the bow, just where the boat hit those waves coming up past Slieve League as we bashed westward from Carrigan Head. By the second season, lift the cuddy floor and we could watch the water squirting up between the planks every time she hit a wave.

We would tie a tyre onto one end of the drift and shoot away our nets, something over half a mile long; normally we shot in towards the land, and of course having no radar or plotter, it took fine judgement to finish up the right distance off. Generally, the closer the better, but it was getting dark by now. Over went the winkie on the end of the net, and we would settle down for a bit of grub and a mug of tea,  while keeping a good eye on that winkie. One never quite new what the drift would do. Sometimes it would keep straight and behave itself, sometimes not. The tea taken, off we would go with a searchlight, made from an old headlight’s sealed beam. The net could be all bunched up any which way, zig-zagging here and there. That was ok too, it was fishy enough if it wasn’t too bunched up, but it also made it pretty good at catching fishing boats!

Now and again I got it on the prop, which would elicit a string of oaths from Jerry. It would have to be cut off with the scythe blade mounted on a shovel shaft that we carried for the purpose. At least you could more or less get at the prop on those double-enders. Once it also got caught around the bottom of the rudder, and as I pulled it to try to pull it off, I lifted the rudder clear off its lower pintle. So there we were with the net caught around the prop and the rudder swinging by the top pintle, half a mile or less from the rocks. Take it easy, get the net off and tie it forward, then I could go over the side hanging on to a couple of tyres, and while being dunked up to the chest in the sea with the lads stopping the rudder from dashing around too much, with a foot on the prop-shaft, I managed to get a spare rowlock in the place of that (now bent) pintle.

On another memorable occasion, when we went to check the drift, we found it had done a complete somersault in the short time while we had our tea; the outside end had come right around and was nearly on the rocks. We went to haul it like mad. It looked as if we would have to cut and leave some of it to do so, but it would have been a serious blow to lose half the nets at that stage. I kept going, but will never forget that big wall of black rock with the water gushing down it, that seemed so close I could nearly touch it; but I had to concentrate totally on hauling those nets, and kept going, half expecting a horrible crunch. Next moment we were clear of the rocks, safe and with the nets aboard, thank God!

The biggest problem however was getting worse all the time. Jerry referred to the seals alternatively as ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Wallace’. In previous less enlightened times, they had been mercilessly culled. One received a handsome bounty if one presented a seal’s snout at the Guarda barracks, having most likely clubbed the seal to death on some remote shore where they were hauled out to breed. I would not commend that method, but in those times one only had to shoot the drift in the evening and haul it, fish and all, in the morning. Now if you did that, with the seals getting much bolder, chances are you would only get the odd fish that had struck lately, some heads, and observe some more holes in the net with a few scales beside them. Jerry had us travelling the net all night and taking any fish we saw gleaming in our light out of it straight away. That was even more fun than hauling the blessed nets! Sometimes we actually scared fish into the net. But if we left them there, chances were they would be gone in the morning. Wallace was on the job!

Sometimes in the early light we would see the seals working the nets ahead of us. They really liked their salmon, were getting better and better at helping themselves to our nets and were just about impossible to shake off. I bought a .22 rifle, but it was very difficult to shoot them. Anyway they would see the moment you took it up, and take more care. Lucky Jerry didn’t shoot himself in the foot one night, or make a little fountain in the bottom of the boat, when he discharged it by mistake in the cuddy one night. Fortunately the bullet lodged in one of the oak timbers. We were more careful about the safety catch after that!

Gradually we started to get ahead, but it was all a bit too much for the poor Croc Mor. Into the second season, when I left her on her mooring for the daytime and came back in the evening, it was touch and go whether the bilge water would be into the gear box. So to the sad business of depending on automatic electric pumps! GRP seemed to be the answer, much as I have always loved wooden boats. I managed to get a new 36ft Ocean Tramp built in Wicklow after this, and called her Screig n’Iolar. It was just one of those things, there had happened to be Cnoc Mor (Big Hill) up behind our house in Braide, and there was a Screig n’Iolar (Eagle’s Crag) beside it.

As far as I remember we had another couple of seasons salmon fishing with Screig n’Iolar, and she was indeed more fit for it, but as is so often the way of things, by the time you get properly organised for something, the best of it is gone. My most vivid memory of salmon fishing in Screig n’Iolar was when the engine gave some serious trouble. We limped into Malin Beg Uig, where there was a little quay but it was open to the south. I was moored off but got ashore in our little dinghy and eventually got a friendly mechanic to help. Meanwhile the wind went to the southward and a right jopple came into the Uig. Seamus the mechanic was so relieved to get back to the concrete that as he jumped out of the dinghy I was thrown in the water. John was all excited concern, while Jerry just laughed. ‘Do ye think we’ll get rid o’ the f***** that easily?’

What finally knocked our salmon fishing on the head was the fact that I caught a virulent dose of jaundice from some South African visitors, which left me very weak for months. Meanwhile the summer was actually fine, but that was not good for that lark. More and more fishermen were surviving by using illegal deep nets made of monofilament (gut). The salmon fishery descended into a state of war, with shots actually being fired at fishermen by the Navy. Between that and the fact that seals were taking more fish than were being landed, the game was up as far as I was concerned. After a few more years the driftnet fishery was banned altogether.

This was another big nail in the coffin of that way of life. The once teeming salmon, the king of fishes, the fish of knowledge, was in danger of being wiped out. What a category of miseries! The clear, swifting-running rivers where he renewed his tribe were polluted, his feeding grounds were robbed for fish-meal, and yes, man’s ingenuity and his greed were too much, not to mention sentimentality about seals. While it is taken for granted that deer, for instance, must be culled, not so for seals.

Big companies with buckets of oil money think fit to speculate on salmon farms, trusting people to continue to enjoy their salmon despite their being reared somewhat like battery hens. Occupying many a beautiful stretch of sea, they put those noble fish in big cages. At least Whiskers and storms effect the odd escape, with what effects on the remaining wild stock we do not know. The sea-lice thrive in them anyway, and infect wild fish. The salmon must be laced with chemicals. They are suffocated in hundreds of thousands by jelly fish*. The firms will eventually go bust, leaving desolation where there should be wild and pristine coasts. The few jobs minding the farms are no substitute for the fishermen’s livelihoods. Is there any way ahead for our grandchildren’s generation?

The Fish of Knowledge, that expired thrashing their tails on the deck of my boats, their glorious multi-hued skin gradually turning dull, gave me a little advice as they did so: ‘You have a choice!’ I pass it on from them. We too will expire in huge cages unless we have a massive change of heart and mind. Our salvation does not lie in ever more ambitious applications of technology, but in a spiritual and moral revolution.

All forms of greed and pollution will have to be expunged.  If we would live, we will finally have no choice but to become socially and environmentally responsible. For the salmon’s sake, and that is as close as dammit for all our sakes, both the rivers and the high seas must be conscientiously husbanded. The salmon stocks could be nursed back to health. It is hard to think of a better touchstone than our success in doing so, for the earnestness with which we desire a worthwhile future for our grandchildren! Probably the only methods of cropping the salmon that should be tolerated at sea will be such as that of the Teelin draft-nets.

Rigging a net in Nazaré.